The Best Australian Stories 2014 (3 page)

At the bottom of the river, she has her tongue deep inside the mouth of her lover. When she has finished searching there, she litters his chest with tiny kisses, and finds her way down his torso to between his legs. How soft the smooth skin, the gentle mushroom of the tip, the length of him, everything. How sensuous, the desiring mouth.

When the time-space of the dream suddenly shifts, it is daytime, and she has the boys in tow. The children are sullen, playing gingerly at the shallow end of the pool, perhaps sensing they have been excluded from something. Then they are gone again, apparitions, neither here nor there.

Still resting a hand against her thigh after making love, the hanged man tells her, ‘I feel safe with you.'

‘You
are
safe,' she says.

*

Super-massive black holes exist. Each has its own event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which no light can pass.

‘Why,' she asks him, ‘is a black hole called a black hole? Why not something a little more positive, like a great emptiness, a profound nothing?'

‘It's a descriptive title. They are black. They are holes.'

‘They are super-massive.'

‘Hence, super-massive black holes.'

*

Sex is forgetting. Setting down the thread of the narrative, unravelling time. There are two bodies, a wide bed. There is his tongue between her legs. If there ever were a border between them, it is gone now, dissolved.

If there were such things as days, nights, they would be passing right here, without note. If there were such a thing as the outside world, it would be smaller now than ever, like a fleck of dust in the sunlight, both here and not here, something to wonder at only briefly.

Passing. Into the body of the hanged man, her own fragility, her future, all of the hours and weeks and years she has spent ghostlike, uninhabited. Here in the great wide bed of the river, she is herself with him, his tongue at her edges until she floods, buoyant, and he carries her. He carries her, and she is everything. No. Border.

When they are tangled, when they are lost in one another's limbs, when the light falls this way and she opens her eyes and sees only his skin, the beautiful surface of him, they are the whole world. When she plays with him like that until he moans and shudders, when everything firm turns to liquid in her mouth, when she is drunk on him, there is no universe but this.

*

It is peak hour in the City of Light. A woman cycles slowly up a steep incline. Whole minutes are swallowed by the languorous rhythm of her pedals.

Don't look at her. The river will take what she needs, when she needs it. She will swell or contract. She will swallow or reveal. She can reshape herself.

I am here,
a voice tells the children.
I am here. Can't you see me?

The Coffee Table

Shaun Prescott

The new coffee table was an event. It was meant to be a prized relic. It was adamantly yet futilely historic in its design. It seemed like a BBC
Pride and Prejudice
coffee table. It was forbidden for anyone to place a cup on this table, and it was considered rude and punishable to place a magazine or Blu-Ray case on it too. You weren't allowed to do anything with this coffee table, because it was meant to just
be there
– it was not allowed to have a function. It existed to remain the way it was forever.

There were several conflicts surrounding the coffee table. Dad insisted that the children give it a wide berth because he didn't want it marked. Dad and Mum would lie legs-to-shoulders on the couch in honour of the coffee table. A foot on its surface was, for the kids, a declaration of war, and for the parents, an abasement of principle.

Dad bought the coffee table on a whim. It was three hundred dollars at the local furniture retailer, and he had bought it because he felt unhappy in his lounge room. A good coffee table, when poised between lounge and television, feels like a hole plugged. The room is rendered newly civilised and, depending on the table's quality, potentially decadent. But you don't realise this until you see the right coffee table. You can understand why a man who has paid three hundred dollars for this sensation would like it preserved, no matter the energy and anguish such preservation requires. There was even a ceremony when the coffee table was first placed in the centre of the room, during which Dad laid down the rules, the kids in a semicircle around it, eager to dive into its newness. ‘No feet, no food, no cups' were the rules. Always nothing, always the absence of something. And fair enough too – it was an expensive coffee table.

When the coffee table was brand-new, Dad would spend more time watching DVDs in the lounge room. He watched films he'd already seen and filed away, just for the sensation. He would glance at the coffee table and know it was there. Rather than sitting at the kitchen table of a morning, Dad would instead opt to sit on the couch in the lounge room in order to be close to, or in a remote manner using, the new coffee table. Mum and Dad would talk about the coffee table and the ways they could help it reach its potential. A rug beneath, maybe. Or a TV cabinet with the same oak panelling. Or a similarly wrought table in the adjoining dining room. For at least two weeks the coffee table was something to be discussed, and acted as a launching pad for dreams. And it was true that when any member of the family returned home from school or work, the mere sight of this new coffee table in the lounge room was satisfying. You could pretend that it'd always been there, and that yes, having coffee tables of this calibre was a fact in your life that you may now take for granted because there it was: you were capable of having it.

There were punishments for infractions against the coffee table in that first fortnight. The youngest of three, Greg, aged nine, ran a toy truck upon its surface. Dad smacked him twice on the bum and sent him to his room. It was a statement of intent on Dad's part: a declaration that preserving the coffee table was a priority in his disciplinary regime. For a time there were few transgressions that could equal this. ‘One day you may inherit this coffee table,' Dad told Greg later. ‘Then you will know what it's like.' In tears, Greg could only nod and walk away.

Dad had never had a coffee table before, had never gained a history with one, and he admired households with longstanding coffee tables that simply bled into the room without announcing themselves, and he hoped that one day this coffee table would inherit a legacy of some kind, that it would provide him with an entitlement to history. Let's not deplete this item too quickly; let's make it bear witness to something first: some essential moment that speaks of us.

But when Jennifer, eleven, was caught sliding the remote control across the table to Greg, Dad believed his plans for the table were being openly violated, and he felt for the first time – and not the last – that it might be sensible to have the coffee table locked away in his shed next to his second car and security system. In a rage, Dad lashed the back of Jennifer's legs with his belt and sent her to her room. How dare they, when he had surrendered everything else, a man halfway through, with the little that he had to show for his life being eroded day by day, usually by invisible forces but occasionally by visible ones, right in front of his eyes, directly challenging him. And he had control over nothing at all. It was pure luck that the incident left no marks, but who can rely on luck?

Eventually he covered the coffee table with a thick grey blanket that smelt of dog. The same rules applied – ‘no feet, no food, no cups' – but they were mere tokens now, and this was a test. Dad stopped sitting in the lounge room and spent more time in his shed, gazing blankly at his security screens with their footage of his home's front door. The stillness of the live footage – the way the verandah and the bricks and the steps never shuddered, even though live – was appealing to him, because in contrast with the Blu-Ray films he owned, this was how he would arrange his life: objects suspended in steady impassive time, his own and his loved ones' figures present but at a safe distance, the objects buffered by some sympathetic gelatin. In Europe, he speculated, the air you breathe is objects turned to dust. Centuries of transient goods turned to cinders, their molecular pieces inhaled and exhaled daily, and what a fate! But let these objects accrue decades and maybe a couple of centuries of steadfast witnessing first, and let them transfer humble familial sentiments to revering descendants, because only then are they worthy of the air. That was his theory as he gazed blankly at the front door via a monochrome security screen, and wondered whether there was an alternative to this, wondering too what was happening right now with the coffee table.

For a while the coffee table stood and was not interfered with. There were no events. Time passed around the coffee table: the item was autonomous. Greg edged to the lounge, and Jennifer avoided the room altogether. And in the name of preservation this was preferable, but Dad now felt the coffee table was being taken for granted. Why are we not celebrating the coffee table, and marvelling at what it signifies, that is, the beginning of a history, as if pressing the record button forever from here. He conceived a few possible objections to the coffee table: for example, that it was not historical enough, and that the history he had conferred upon it was negligible and petulant. And he would go to work and make files and feel angry about it.

He needed to explain himself to someone. On a Friday night it was his routine to drink a bottle of Jim Beam mixed with Coke. He would do this methodically: the bourbon the length of his thumb upright, the Coke a centimetre from the top, and then three lumps of ice. He would marvel at the bubbles. And during these Friday nights he'd tell his wife that what would become of them and their kids was as unknowable as it was arbitrary, and that through some innate condition of things eventually they would have whole landscapes of dreams set out in plastic photo-books, eager, in their very design, to be burned or destroyed someday. There is a great weight bearing down, he would tell his wife, drunk, that offers no quarter. Everything will be destroyed, so this object, which he wanted so much to serve as his legacy, needed to last for as long as possible. And his wife thought this was noble, because of the family. But for him it was a tapeworm, this instinct towards posterity. This desire to taunt the future with the memory of him.

‘Fucking cunt,' he would mutter whenever something went astray. ‘Cunt,' when swearing with brevity. When the bottle of Coke was empty it was a cunt. When the son or daughter mishandled the coffee table, they were cunts. It was a cunt of a life, he would sometimes say to himself, as if it were a bluntly poignant insight. And he hated everyone not exactly situated as he was: the poorer and the richer, because both groups could lay claim to something he couldn't, because both groups had their own extreme forms of coffee table: the bad and the grandiose. What a cunt, he would think as he stared at the non-events on his monochrome screen, the door firmly shut, untampered with. That brand-new coffee table inside, which he didn't know how to exploit.

About a month after the coffee table had been installed, Rowan, his eldest son at fifteen, was home on holiday from boarding school. Rowan had heard a lot about the coffee table from Mum, who sang its praises with a zeal approaching the evangelical. He was ambivalent towards the coffee table but praised it nonetheless to his dad, who was proud of it. ‘It's definitely a nice coffee table,' he said to Dad when it was presented to him for the first time, and this unveiling – the dog's blanket was removed for the occasion – proceeded in a very earnest and eventful fashion. ‘How much was it?'

Dad buckled. ‘It was expensive!' What right has the child to question?

‘I bet,' Rowan said, and turned his attention elsewhere, chiefly to his brother, who was destroying their sister's dolls in the bedroom.

Rowan was home for a fortnight, and he spent a lot of time in the lounge room watching pay TV. He was aware of Dad's policies and so, when Dad was away, would rest his feet on the table's surface. It was something that he felt obligated to do: seriously, what the hell was the story with this coffee table? Eventually he felt so audacious that he stood on it, and then bounced twice, and then he lifted the coffee table onto its side and spat on the underside, and he would have liked to piss on it, this coffee table, which was so pathetic, this badge of an ageing man with three kids and a sports car and a job that eroded his passion, a man already dead in many ways. Rowan looked at the blanket that lay draped – and probably forever would – on its surface and wondered whether this was waiting for him, and wondered how to cancel it. Because were he to inherit this cheaply made piece of chipboard, he would burn it twice. He would burn this one, buy another the same, and burn it, and the second would feel just as great as the first. And he did indeed take to flicking a cigarette lighter to its underside, very briefly, just the spark, leaving no obvious marks, but the very act of doing so felt important. And he ran the edge of a fifty-cent coin vigorously on the underside of the coffee table's feet, for minutes at a time, leaving deep marks that no one would ever see. And he swore at the coffee table, he called it a ‘cunt' while kicking its ridges, with the blanket on. And he spilled whole pint glasses of cola on its surface and then rubbed it meticulously clean. He imagined how the coffee table would splinter at the blow of an axe, and how funny that would be, destroying this stupid cipher right in front of Dad, as he melted like a witch.

And all the while, as he filed at work, Dad fought the dread.

Meanjin

The Horse Hospital in Dubai

Lucy Neave

Jackie fears she might fall asleep standing up like a horse. She arrived in Dubai from Melbourne at 1.45 am and it is now 8 am on the same day. She wears the required white lab coat, with a stethoscope looped over the back of her neck. In the green treatment area of the horse hospital, she waits to be told what she should be doing. First, a man who is also dressed in white – a groom's uniform, she thinks – leads a chestnut filly through the barn doors. Next, a man in a suit emerges from a long green hallway. He's a horse vet, Jackie guesses, because he approaches the filly and slides his hand down its leg. Once he's inspected the horse, he walks over to Jackie and seems to inspect her too.

‘What do you think?' he says. ‘Osteoarthritis?' His accent is English and he is more than forty years old.

Jackie is a student intern; she hardly knows anything. Besides that, she hasn't seen the horse trot out and therefore can't tell if it is lame. The vet squeezes her arm.

‘Muscles,' he says. ‘Where are you from?'

Jackie – who is a couple of centimetres taller than this man – squares her shoulders. His hand lingers on her biceps and she shifts her arm to dislodge it.

‘Where do you think?' she says.

‘You're an Aussie. I'm Dr Rick.'

She holds out her hand. ‘Jackie.'

Dr Rick presses his dumpling-white palm against hers and then her hand is dropped and he slides his arm across her shoulders. ‘Babu, meet my new wife,' he says to the man who is holding the horse.

Babu nods at her. She nods back and says, ‘Like I need another husband.'

‘You're not married,' Dr Rick says.

‘I am.' She holds up her third finger, where she wears her wedding band. Dr Rick doesn't notice she is sort of giving him the finger.

‘I don't believe you, but you can be my Dubai wife,' Dr Rick says. ‘Really I could only tie the knot with a hotshot divorce lawyer, so that I'd be terrified to leave her.'

Jackie tries to catch Babu's eye – is that really his name? Or just something that Dr Rick calls him? – but he is stroking the filly's neck. Dr Rick steps forward and slides a needle into the horse's jugular.

Right then a woman appears through the double doors separating the stables and hospital from the interns' living quarters. The woman is wearing a white coat and a stethoscope too. Her hair is completely dry – Jackie's is still damp from the shower – and the woman's eyebrows are symmetrical arches on her fine-pored face.

‘Mila,' the woman says, holding out her hand to Jackie. She is American. The woman introduces herself to Rick and then asks, ‘You're injecting fetlocks? May I do it, under your supervision? I'm the new graduate intern: I'm here for six months.'

Jackie is only in Dubai for a month.

Rick says, ‘You've brave, coming here. You Yanks are usually too scared to come.'

‘Why?' Mila asks.

‘Something to do with the Gulf War?'

‘That was over years ago,' Mila says. ‘Clinton's our president now. You know that, right?'

‘Smart one,' Rick says. His voice is loaded with sarcasm, but Mila doesn't notice. He lays a hand on Mila's biceps, stopping her, and tries to catch Babu's eye. ‘Wow, you've got some muscle there.' He attempts to imitate Mila's accent.

‘Used to be a gymnast,' Mila says.

Rick rests his arm on the back of Mila's neck and at that moment Mila turns slightly in Jackie's direction so that Jackie catches a glimpse of her curled lip.

‘Babu,' Rick says to the groom, ‘meet my new wife.'

Cock,
Jackie thinks. She mouths the word at Mila, but Mila doesn't see.

‘Good one,' Babu says, nodding. The horse snorts, as though the heady rush of sedative has reached its brain.

*

Dr Rick drives Jackie and Mila out to see lame or sick horses in stables all over Dubai. His friend Vince, another vet who's a New Zealander, comes too. Vince is younger, more serious and wears black-rimmed glasses. He doesn't react when Rick says to the grooms, ‘This is my new wife,' and puts his arm around Jackie's shoulders. The grooms laugh. Maybe they are embarrassed for her. Most of the grooms look as though they are from India or Pakistan.

Does Jackie stamp on the arch of Rick's foot? Does she elbow him in the stomach, the way she was taught in Women's Self-Defence training in Brunswick? She does not. In fact, she does nothing.

During Jackie's second week in Dubai, a horse comes in with colic and needs surgery. Jackie is inducted into the rooms of green and grey linoleum behind the operating theatre. She watches Rick scrub his arms with their long dark hairs and then scrubs her own, coating each surface of her hands with iodine, using the taps that are turned on with one's elbow. She puts on the green gown and gloves and follows him into the operating theatre. There, Rick gropes in the cauldron of horse's intestines and brings out the ileo-caecal intussusception. She stands across from him in the wash of
Carmen
– he favours opera when he is operating – and holds the two pieces of gut while he sutures their ends together. She feels like some essential other half, as though she fits here, opposite Rick, the stew of horse guts between them and sweat dripping down her back. Rick's eyes lift and meet hers as the toreador song plays. The horse lies on its back, hovering on this side of death, anaesthetised by Vince. It is a young Arabian, its four black hooves motionless, its eyes rolled down. After stapling together the skin of the horse's belly, they retreat to Rick's office. Once there, Rick brings out a bottle of Irish malt which he keeps in a cabinet under his desk. Alcohol is forbidden in the hospital, but as if that would stop Dr Rick.

‘Popped your colic surgery cherry,' he says to Jackie. ‘How does it feel?'

These words should make her wince. Rick runs his hand across the top of her head, down the inverted J of her ponytail. His hand feels springy as dough, warm on her shoulder and she can't help thinking that the hand saved the horse. Right now, the horse is on the CCTV – drugged and shaky, but alive – and beginning to rise in a padded cell full of grooms in white shirts and trousers. She, Rick and Vince have cured it. The intensity of the feeling and Rick's attention make her pull her hair from its band and shake it free. Rick takes a handful of her hair and presses it to his face.

*

The only phone Jackie can use is in the outer barn, where the not-so-sick horses are housed. When she enters the barn, Umar – who must be Jackie's age – is sweeping the breezeway. He stops as she passes. In every interaction she senses the hierarchy here. Vets at the top, with Mila at the bottom of the top – Mila has finished her degree – then Jackie. Next grooms, who X-ray horses without wearing lead gloves or lead aprons, as though they are expendable. Beneath them are the cleaners and the man who would iron her underpants if she would let him. And over and above all of them are people like the ones she startled in the stables. One night, when she got up to give a horse a dose of Neopen, she came upon a man and a woman who were part of one of the ruling families, she is sure. The man – young, slender – wore a Ralph Lauren shirt and chinos; the woman, who was wearing a hijab, was dressed in jeans and a black silk top. A lace veil covered the woman's face but when Jackie looked at her, she could see through the lace to the woman's eyes and long dark lashes. With gloved hands the woman gripped the bars of the stable, gazing in at a racehorse on an IV: the horse Jackie had come to dose with antibiotics.

‘Can I feed him something?' The woman withdrew a tube of English polo mints from her handbag and Jackie shook her head.

‘Tomorrow.'

Jackie looked for them again the following night, when she got up at midnight to check on the horses, but the man and the woman weren't there, or had come when she had been asleep. She would've liked to have talked with the woman.

Jackie punches in the phone-card number, then her husband George's number. He's started working on a new miniseries; he will want to improvise dialogue with her. She is in Dubai, having adventures, and all he wants is to insert her into his imaginary world. She shakes her head slightly and imagines him lying in bed with some of his hair sticking up at the back. Her longing for him is physical, a desire to be wrapped in his sleepy arms which has not ebbed, even though they have been married for three years already. A part of her knows that she settled down too young.

When George answers the phone, he says, ‘What?'

‘Did I wake you?'

‘When are you coming home?' He asks this every time she speaks to him, even though he knows she's coming back in five days.

‘When do you think?' she says.

‘Did you sneak into the camel hospital again?'

‘No.'

‘You're a foreign correspondent. You've decided to leave your husband and stay with an Irish camerawoman in Grozny. You're in love.'

Jackie says, ‘Not today.'

George is already in character. ‘“When are you coming back? Will you be home for Valentine's Day?”'

‘All right. I'll try,' Jackie says. ‘“I can't come home right now …”'

George interrupts. ‘My name's Stan.'

‘Call him something else. Like Eliot. Make him sound more urban?' Then she says, ‘“I don't think I can come home right now, Eliot. I'm going to have to stay here for another three weeks. You heard the rebels brought down a Russian chopper?”'

‘Great, Jackie,' George says.

He's writing it down; she can hear his pen scratching the paper. She thinks her dialogue is too expository. She says, ‘I swam in the Persian Gulf.'

George is still writing. ‘I just had an idea. What if you tell me straight: “I've fallen in love with this woman”? That's more your character.'

Umar is now in the stable closest to the phone. He's grooming a horse, the long strokes of the brush smoothing the hair on its flank, the horse's upper lip growing long with pleasure.

She says, ‘I can't do that. People listen.'

‘I'll send you an email with the dialogue in it. Tell me what you think.'

‘Can't go to an internet cafe tonight – I told you – and I have to go to the races. Just wait till I get home.'

‘You're indentured. You're not getting paid and yet you work seven days per week.'

‘Let's talk about it tomorrow. The card's about to run out of money.'

‘The irony!' George says. ‘Okay. See you. Fine.'

This is bad enough. And then, as she's putting down the phone, Umar says to her, ‘I know you are not a good girl.'

‘What?'

He repeats what he said and adds, ‘And you are married.'

Mila is standing in the doorway at the other end of the barn with the sun behind her. The white coat she wears is uncreased, ironed by the man in the laundry, whose name Jackie doesn't know. Mila tells her that they have twenty minutes, and suggests that they go to buy some new shoes.

‘I shouldn't,' Jackie says. She glances at Umar, who's watching her.

‘Did you know?' Mila begins, lowering her voice, and beckons for Jackie to come outside. They close the sliding door behind them. ‘They give students an envelope of cash when they leave. I'm not meant to tell you. I know you're on a budget, but buy yourself a new pair of shoes. We're going out after the races tonight.'

Mila drives them to the closest mall. Inside, it could be a mall anywhere, with its long marble halls and brass fixtures. They pass boutique after boutique, most of which are empty apart from salespeople in western clothes. In a shoe store presided over by a woman who looks and sounds Italian, Jackie chooses a pair of ankle-high black boots with a heel.

Mila says they are glam, even though they are the cheapest shoes in the store. The shoes are a step up from Jackie's broad-toed boots with rainbow laces. In the shop next door, they try on trousers. The fabric of Jackie's is shiny, with slender pinstripes. She steps out of the dressing room and finds Mila trying on a grey pair in a similar style.

‘They look great,' Mila says. She slides a hand down her thigh.

As they walk back to the four-wheel drive, carrying their shopping bags, Mila says, ‘Are you going to miss Dr Rick?'

‘Yeah,' Jackie says.

‘He invited us over for a spa tonight. Because you have only five days left,' Mila says. ‘I feel bad for you. I'm not going to want to go home.'

Jackie nods.

‘Every time I talk to Will it reminds me that it's like a flat bottle of Coke back there. Still tastes okay, but there're no bubbles left. Why?' Mila says.

They find the car and get inside. It smells of horse.

‘I think it's because of Dr Rick,' Jackie says.

She knows that Rick is a jerk, and still.

*

At dusk, Vince and Jackie stand in the parade ring at the racetrack. Jackie looks at everything so that she can hold it in her memory. On another occasion, Vince told her that at the very top of the stands, behind a row of tinted windows, the princesses sit and watch the races unfold below. According to Vince – and maybe this is a fairy-tale – some of the Dubai princesses train racehorses. They hire English lady trainers and fly them out from England to help with the horses. On race nights, the princesses sit behind these windows, which render them invisible.

Jackie wonders if the princesses have binoculars, or if they watch everything on CCTVs. She wonders, now, if the woman who she will never speak to, the woman she saw in the stables one night, was one of these princess racehorse trainers. She imagines what she and Vince would look like from the top of the stands. It would be as if they were on some distant reality TV show.

Now the horses are coming into the ring, tossing their heads. ‘Which do you fancy?' Vince says. The game is to pick the winner on sight.